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David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time: Review of the BONE CLOCKS and Preview of an Interview

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David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time: Review of the BONE CLOCKS and Preview of an Interview David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time: Review of THE BONE CLOCKS and Preview of an Interview By Paul A. Harris, Editor, SubStance David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, the latest iteration of his fractal imagination, follows a central character’s life through six decades in six sections that simultaneously succeed as stand-alone stories. Protagonist Holly Sykes narrates the first and final chapters; in the middle ones, her life is seen prismatically through the lenses of others who cross her path: Cambridge student Hugo Lamb, war journalist Ed Brubeck, bad-boy author Crispin Hershey, and Horologist Marinus. Navigating this narrative proves to be a rollicking ride: the plot is a propulsive page-turner, picking up momentum as it goes; the narrative is kaleidoscopic-episodic, unfolding in a series of juxtapositions and sometimes sudden shifts; the style is protean, skipping skillfully among different rhetorical registers, allusive layers, and literary genres. At the same time, The Bone Clocks is a tightly woven text that recursively loops through Mitchell’s previous books and ultimately interlaces all his books into an intricate, sprawling intertext. Returning Mitchell readers will encounter familiar faces (Lamb, Marinus), and recognize allusions to his other books (“The Voorman Problem,” a story attributed to Hershey, is from Number9Dream; the “symmetrical structure” of Hershey’s novel Dessicated Embryos can be read as an allusion to Cloud Atlas, and there’s even a comical reference to the movie). Back-stories in The Bone Clocks turn into/out of back- stories to episodes/elements from previous novels (Magistrate Shiroyama’s killing Abbot Enomoto in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet; the Prescients in Cloud Atlas). More broadly, the form of The Bone Clocks is a synthesis of globe-trotting Ghostwritten and time-travelling Cloud Atlas. In tone and style, Holly Sykes’s rebellious teen sojourn into the countryside is straight out of contemporaneously-set Black Swan Green (she’s a slightly older avatar of Jason Taylor). While each chapter of that novel covered a calendar month over a year, each section of The Bone Clocks is set in a specific decade, beginning thirty years ago and ending thirty years into the future. Eventually, one surmises that the heterogeneous characters and events in The Bone Clocks, and its central plot conflicts, are all always already written into something called “The Script,” a self-reflexive motif for the text itself, and perhaps for Mitchell’s body of work as well. For those encountering Mitchell’s writing for the first time, reading the novel might well feel like listening intently to a complex, swinging jazz tune (and this may hold for anyone’s first trip through The Bone Clocks). Like such compositions, the novel unfolds not in a simple linear, metric fashion, but instead features syncopated rhythms (present moments have distinct, different intensities; scenes pass at different speeds; prolepses and analepses bend loops in the narrative arc) and tonal variation achieved through improvisational stylistic riffing (e.g., a chaotic bar scene catalogued as a rhythmically rhyming list in a sort of prose rap; a writer’s lecture folds into the text a pithy literary critical accounting of itself; a cinematically rendered abduction/rescue scene culminating in a firefight inside a police van is reminiscent of the famous car ambush scene in Children of Men). Like an ensemble trading solos, the text invites different voices/viewpoints to enter and ‘stretch out’ (a war journalist’s view of 2004 Iraq, a girl’s youth in provincial 19th century Russia). Following the novel, like tracking the complexities of a jazz tune, can make your head hurt at times—you are not sure if and how something fits at first but afterwards or on repeated examination, it feels just right. And, true to the cyclic nature of jazz innovation and performance (each soloist improvises on a given structure; each version makes a familiar tune new again), The Bone Clocks ends on a note that looks to the next story: “for a voyage to begin, another one must end, sort of.” In fractal texts, one might say, it’s synecdoche all the way down. The salient synecdoche in Mitchell’s latest book is the labyrinth, which appears as both recurrent motif and central plot element, and provides it with an apt conceptual model: The Bone Clocks is a time-labyrinth that explores the labyrinthine nature of time. (Terminological note: I will follow Mitchell in conflating labyrinth and maze, though technically they are not the same.) Viewed from the outside, labyrinths and time have a distinct structure through which one moves in two symmetrical directions (respectively, the path from entrance to center and back out; going back into the past or forward into the future). Experienced from the inside, labyrinths and time offer a dizzying series of disorienting choices made without complete information; learning is largely trial and error. Mitchell marks the dual nature of labyrinths from the outset: as Holly packs to leave home as the book begins, her “freaky little brother” Jacko gives her a labyrinth composed of “eight or nine circles inside each other” that looks “dead simple” but Jacko insists is “diabolical.” Hugo Lamb finds Holly’s pendant of the labyrinth and at first just looks at it before discovering that the route through it can be found only by painstaking manual tracing. Similarly, the temporal structure of Mitchell’s novel appears simple enough: in relation to our historical present, its sections ripple outwards symmetrically into the past and future. But when one first reads the text, without an outside perspective on its structure, the path through the narrative takes unexpected twists and turns, following its own labyrinthine logic. The linear path along the narrative present is disrupted regularly and punctured with holes (events occur that characters are made to forget and that readers cannot make sense of initially); these holes seem like proleptic gaps inserted for later explanation; conversely, crucial events in the storyline (including marriages, childbirths, deaths, abortions) occur ‘between’ narrative sections and are analeptically back-filled. The text is peppered with images of two-way labyrinthine temporality: Ed Brubeck, because he wants his war reporting “to make a tiny dent in the world’s memory,” is seen as “an archivist for the future”; Holly is told that “the future looks a lot like the past.” Self-similarly, the plot of The Bone Clocks unfolds two distinct storylines on two distinct temporal levels. One plot thread depicts a war being waged across generations among more-than-mortals who transcend or resist time’s passage; the other traces Holly Sykes through the seasons of her life. More-than-mortals move on a different plane; they can flit into and out of human lives like Sphere moving through A Square’s world in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland; they can erase (“hiatus”) things from people’s memories or persuade (“suasion”) people to think or do things. The more-than-mortals plotline drops in on the mortal one abruptly and enigmatically at first, and even as it becomes more fleshed out it retains a cryptic logic (in different senses): it plants puzzles; it allows characters and memories to be encrypted for later recovery; it is full of crypts, holding secrets and ghosts. By contrast, mere mortals move forward in time as a forking labyrinth. A character frantically searching for a lost child feels “a prodding certainty that I’m in a labyrinth not only of turnings and doors but decisions and priorities, that I’ve been in not just a minute or two but ages, years, and that I took some bad turns many years ago that I can’t get back to.” Only information from the other temporal level can reveal a route out of the labyrinth: the character is told he is of the Script, and then sees Jacko’s labyrinth at the moment he hears a voice speaking a clue through Holly. As this episode demonstrates, while the book’s two central plotlines unfold on different levels of time, the overarching plot of The Bone Clocks emerges from the intersections and interplay between them. Labyrinths, since Daedalus, have embodied the ingenuity of their artificers. Mitchell has already authored a mind- and boundary-stretching time labyrinth in Cloud Atlas. Indeed, because its sections move forward in time until the middle, and then move backwards again to where it started, that novel’s structuring most overtly resembles the route through a labyrinth. Cloud Atlas, in expanding the parameters of novelistic narrative time by stringing together stories from centuries in the past to centuries in the future, changed the fundamental grounding and scale of novelistic narrative time: rather than focusing on an individual life or single culture through historical epochs, it charts an evolutionary history of the human species on the earth. The implication or upshot of that text is that our lives are unfolding on and embedded in several temporal scales nested in one another; we act in a ‘present’ that can be situated within the scope of individual lives, cultural and political histories, and ecological planetary history alike. In short, Cloud Atlas is a novel of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch defined by humans becoming a force that changes global natural history. Mitchell’s innovation here is that the text aligns the different temporal scales; the plotlines of Holly’s life and the more-than-mortals share the same timeline. Seminal events are happening in both her mortal existence and the existences of those whose lives span generations. In addition, the span of Holly’s life encompasses a turning in the Anthropocene; by the time of her old age in the final section, she can deliver a mournful eulogy of how humanity destroyed planetary ecologies.
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